Best of 2010 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Stand by Stephen King
• John Dies @ the End by David Wong
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
• Magician by Raymond E. Feist
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (3 stars)

I saw this book reviewed on the First Tuesday Book Club, and was intrigued, as the comments were positively glowing from all the reviewers. 'Fantastic' and 'genius' were thrown around! I have to say I was a little disappointed, but I'm glad I read this 274-page stream-of-consciousness rant. The fictional definition of Portnoy's complaint at the start of the book sums things up quite nicely:

A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.

The book begins with a sex-obsessed Jewish boy living with his overbearing parents and using every possible opportunity to masturbate. He even pretends he has diarrhea, so as to visit the toilet more often to 'pull his putz', all while his mother stands outside the door screaming that she wants to see his stool! From there the reader follows Portnoy's complaint through a series of terrible relationships and graphic sexual encounters. I can imagine this book was fairly controversial when it was published in 1969.

The writing is impressive, but also quite irritating. It feels like you are being yelled at by a narcissistic arsehole who loves the 'C-word'. Having said that, Roth does a great job of creating Portnoy and building his character.

3 stars.

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore (2.5 stars)

This book has an interesting premise - two boys share the same name and grow up in the same rough neighbourhood in Baltimore. One becomes a Rhodes scholar and works on wall street, the other goes to gaol for shooting a cop in a jewellery robbery. Why?

Moore examines his early childhood, and that of his namesake. Some of the early passages were cringe-worthy with Moore giving a Brady-bunch portrayal of arguments between his parents:

"Wes, he needs to learn what is acceptable and what is not!" My father agreed, but with a gentle laugh, reminded her that cursing at a young boy wasn't the most effective way of making a point.

But for the most part, Moore describes both upbringings, their choices and key events, well. The author claims to not know what made the difference between his life and the other Wes, but it is fairly obvious - the upbringing, education, and (relative) wealth of his mother. When author-Wes was heading down the drugs/gangland path his mother moved neighbourhoods, worked two jobs, and eventually pooled together enough money to send him to an expensive military academy. After some initial rebellion author-Wes settled into academy life, and excelled.

In contrast, the other Wes looked up to his drug dealer half-brother, and his mother was powerless to stop his slide into dealing and violence.

An interesting book, and a pretty good first book, but it felt a little lacklustre. The author also put me off side with a self-centered brag about his travels and achievements at the end of the book:

I've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and felt how quickly the dense Kenyan heat at the base of the mountain transforms into the chill of its snowcapped peak, where deep breaths are hard to find. I've worshiped with thousands of other Christians in the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world's largest Christian congregation, in Seoul, Korea. And I've...

2.5 stars

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton (3.5 stars)

Harvard MBAs are everywhere - working as CEOs of Silicon Valley startups, at the highest levels of government (George W. Bush has a Harvard MBA!?!), and at the head of some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Having been to Harvard and gotten the tourist tour, I was interested to hear about how the MBA works, and about what goes on behind the closed doors.

Broughton takes you inside the privileged world of the MBA, and he does a great job. Before chucking in the towel for a $170,000 2-year trip through MBA-land he was the Paris bureau chief for the UK Daily Telegraph.

Being a Harvard MBA is certainly interesting - they get amazing speakers (Al Gore, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan, various heads of state and fortune 500 companies), and the case-driven education that uses real-world scenarios seems effective and challenging.

Broughton also details a fair bit of ugliness, this passage made me sad:

Once you get accepted by HBS, you want to clear out your bank account so that you get more financial aid.
I'm sorry, I'm not getting this. You buy a BMW to get financial aid?
When you list your assets in the financial aid application, you don't have to mention your car, but you do have to list any savings or property. So you buy a car for twenty thousand dollars, maybe you get an extra twenty thousand dollars in financial aid, so basically HBS buys you a BMW. If you hadn't bought the car, you'd have to pay the twenty thousand dollars out of your savings.
...
This is unbelieveable. How many people do this?
Everyone coming from Wall Street knows about this. And the consulting firms. It doesn't always work. But lots of people try it.

Broughton counts among his MBA peers some amazingly motivated and bright students. For many, but not all, the motivation is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow:

New MBAs joining a top private equity firm such as Blackstone, KKR, Texas Pacific Group, or Bain Capital, could expect to earn $400,000 in their first year. First-year investment bankers, by contrast, could expect maybe half of that, provided everything went well. To exacerbate the bankers' inferiority, they knew they would probably have to spend most of their time raising money and pitching ideas for their friends in private equity...You could earn $200,000 a year straight out of school, and your peers would still think you had failed.

The counterbalance to the vast sums of money is the tails of woe from a personal perspective - crushing workloads, ridiculous hours, and terrible family lives. Broughton meditates on this theme for much of the book, especially as he attempts to get a job at the end of the second year, and finds himself applying for jobs he doesn't really want. Towards the end of the book the bitterness of not being able to find a job with a newly minted MBA seeps in.

The book ends with a postscript the author added when the financial crisis hit in 2008, just as the book was published. I thought this section was a terrible, sore-loser rant against HBS, its culture, and its methods. There may be a fair chunk of blame to be laid with Harvard MBAs, but this was a poor way to do it.

I'll leave you with one final quote. Bureaucrats everywhere, listen up to Toyota, king of Just-In-Time:

To implement jidoka, Toyota had to eliminate any sense of stigma for an employee who halted the production process. Above each station along the production line, the company installed a pull, an andon, which the worker was encouraged to pull whenever he spotted a problem...After diagnosing the problem, the [team] leader would then lead his team in the Five Whys, a means of getting to the root of any problem. If you just asked why, you would get the immediate cause of a problem. If you asked it four more times, you would get to the bottom of the problem. The company encouraged workers never to assume any process was set in stone and to seek constant improvement...Toyota was such a success because it considered nothing too small. The company was constantly seeking to improve even the minutest details of its operation, and every employee was involved.

3.5 stars

The Stand by Stephen King (4.5 stars)

I have to admit to picking this book up because it was really long. I got it at a tiny English-language section in a book store in Lima, Peru. I knew I wasn't going to find English books again for some weeks and didn't want to be caught with nothing to read. At 1320 dense-font pages it certainly served me well in that regard. Unfortunately it has meant my reading numbers are down a bit from last year :(

I really enjoyed this book, and despite the length I was engaged for the entire story and didn't find it a drag. Not many books attempt to cover pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse in any detail, but this one succeeds at the task. I haven't read any other King novels, apart from The Green Mile, and was pleasantly surprised to find this one wasn't a horror story, but a novel about a germ-warfare outbreak apocalypse, with a creepy supernatural good vs. evil flavour.

The original edition was published in 1975, and the one I read was the extended version published in 1990. I found it interesting to think how much the world has changed since 75. There is a large chunk of the book at the start of the Captain Trips outbreak where the government effectively controls the media through force, presumably to stop mass panic but also to cover up their colossal screw-up. That sort of action would just not be effective these days, with so much information available so quickly via the Internet.

I liked a number of the characters in the book, but I think Harold Lauder's character was brilliant. He reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly, in his verbose high-minded criticism of the world and his extremely awkward attempts at seducing Frannie.

I thought King's portrayal of the struggles of the survivors post-apocalypse was fantastic. I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the ending, after such an amazing build-up it seemed too obvious and neat, with a smell of deus ex machina.

A long ride, but a good one.

4.5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to watching the 1994 four-part miniseries with Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald. It is terrible - Randall is an 80s cowboy with big hair and is a completely implausible bad guy, lacking all of the sinister presence Randall has in the book. I'd love to see the Cohen Brothers take a crack at a really dark re-make of this series.

Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (5 stars)

I took this book to South America because it has been on my to-read list for ages, and it is an epic, so I wouldn't finish it too quickly in a non English-speaking country :)

I loved it. The mix of royal political intrigue, church politics and power struggles, and the ambitions of the characters was endlessly entertaining.

The plot does suffer slightly from a linear to and fro between the good guys and the bad guys - good guys win one, bad guys win one, good guys win one....And the characters are perhaps a little too one-sided, being either very good or very bad. Phillip is practically a saint, and Tom Builder's only flaw was the way he handled the bullying between his son and step-son. I can't think of any redeeming qualities of William Hamleigh, the antagonist.

The lengthy descriptions of cathedral architecture and construction would have been vastly improved with some illustrations. I have read many many words about naves, chancels, etc. and am still confused about how they all fit together.

I'm willing to forgive all those flaws, because it is a great book.

5 stars.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel (3.5 stars)

Yet another Iraq book. I couldn't pass this one up since it had so much acclaim, including being a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Finkel's focus is 'the surge', which was interesting and very different from the experiences at the start of the war documented in Generation Kill. The surge was much more bloody, more deadly, and reminded me of Catch-22, with soldiers dreading their next foray out onto the battleground.

The book is well written and takes a fairly dispassionate, unbiased view of events. There seems to be less anger at command incompetence than in Generation Kill. I found this description of Mortuary Affairs soldiers' work fairly confronting:

..whose job was to search the remains for anything personal that a soldier might have wanted with him while he was alive.

"Pictures," one of the soldiers, Sergeant First Class Ernesto Gonzalez, would say later, describing what he has found in uniforms of the bodies he has prepared.

"Graduation pictures. Baby pictures. Standing with their family. Pictures of them with their cars".

"Folded flags," said his assistant, Specialist Jason Sutton.

"A sonogram image," Gonzalez said.

It was also interesting to read about the human cost of the theories expoused by Kilcullen in The Accidental Guerilla, who is quoted by Finkel as being the driving force behind the strategy of establishing small command outposts (COPs) to bring a residential security force to an area.

Finkel also spends a significant amount of time following seriously injured (mostly from IEDs) soldiers and their families. Those soldiers cared for at the US Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center in San Antonio receive, by Finkel's account, an amazing standard of care.

The image of a soldier who lies in a bed wearing goggles that produce a mist to keep his eyes moist, in the absence of eyelids which were burnt off during an IED explosion, will stay with me for a while.

Generally the vibe from the book is the Americans are astounded that Iraqis are fighting them, since all they are trying to do is provide security and repair infrastructure.

"I start thinking about what happened, and then I start thinking about why I'm here," he said. "It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be here? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here. There ain't probably one soldier in this fucking country, unless you are higher up and you're trying to get your star or you're trying to make some rank or a name for yourself - but there ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point.

A very good account of 'the surge', but I would have like to read more about the overall strategy and tactics: what worked and what failed (e.g. Kauzlarich's soccer balls). Finkel tended to jump from tragedy to tragedy, with not much in between.

3.5 stars.

John Dies @ the End by David Wong (4.5 stars)

The original paperback version of this book is selling on Amazon for $200 right now. No kidding. I think that price has been driven by mass popularity (apparently 70,000 people read the original online version) and a very limited print run (you can get the 2010 edition for $10).

It is a horror-comedy, laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and one of the strangest books I have ever read. I didn't find it particularly scary, more just weird and disturbing - it gave me some seriously bizarre dreams. Think the drug-crazed scenes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Donnie Darko. People climbing into giant spiders, which work as elevators, a cavern dug under a trailer complete with a resident fanged giant slug and a pile of human fingers. You get the idea.

The movie rights have been purchased, but no sign of a film yet. I think it would be a great movie, and fairly scary despite the humour.

The humour is mainly one-liners delivered by John:

You're the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man

I particularly liked the series of wrestling puns he delivers as he beats the undead with a chair:

You wants the committee, asshole, then you best meet with the chair!

I liked the Soy Sauce and accompanying special powers:

You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time.

I think it was a shame there wasn't more Soy Sauce in the story. The part when John uses it to talk to Dave through a bratwurst was a highlight:

Glancing around, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead.

A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep this was pretty much rock bottom.

Just when you think the story is getting stupid and ridiculous, Wong throws in a joke to have a laugh at himself:

Good. Now, if I know what's going on here, and I think I do, we'll have to wander around looking for that door. Behind it we'll meet a series of monsters or, more likely, a whole bunch of the same one. We'll kill them, get another key, and then it'll open a really big door. Now right before that we'll probably get nicer guns. It may require us to backtrack some and it might get tedious and annoying.

Creepy, highly entertaining, and funny. Be ready for a lot of gore, poop, and dick jokes.

4.5 stars.

This is Not a Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in The Oilfield by Paul Carter (1.5 stars)

This is the sequel to 'Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse', but unfortunately nowhere near as good. Paul Carter has led a fascinating life on oil rigs all over the world, and his first book is chock full of hilarious stories and crazy shenanigans.

This book tries to continue in the same vein, but unfortunately he used all his best material in the first book. He borrows a number of stories from his Dad and others, but the result is fairly underwhelming.

I did love this description of all the vodkas available in Russia:

...vodka came in bottles, pots, aluminium canisters - you name it. One was a glass rendition of an AK-47, complete with polished rosewood and red satin-lined presentation box, the muzzle being the pouring end.

Of course the stories he does have are every bit as dirty as you would expect from someone working on rigs. His friend Andy (who also had a disturbing poo fetish that was described in some detail) claimed amongst his accomplishments filling a condom with a shot of Baileys, and dropping it behind the bar to get the bar staff back for being slow to serve his drinks. Once they had discovered the slimy mess behind the bar, he went around, picked up the condom and drank the remaining baileys out. Ick.

Read his first book, give this one a miss.

1.5 stars.

Marching Powder by Rusty Young (3.5 stars)

This book is a fascinating insight into life inside San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia; easily one of the strangest prisons in the world.  Money is essential to survive inside the prison.  Inmates are expected to buy their own cells from prison real estate agents, women and children live with their imprisoned husbands/fathers, and laboratories inside prison cells are the source of a large proportion of the cocaine manufactured in Bolivia.

The story follows the life of a British drug smuggler Thomas McFadden, who became famous for running prison tours inside San Pedro (he was even listed in Lonely Planet).  The author, Rusty Young, met McFadden on one of these tours, and set out to write his story of drugs, bribery, and violence.

Strangely the story is told in the first person, which I thought was a little weird when the author was writing about someone else's experiences.  The story also portrays McFadden in a very positive light, he comes across as an all-round nice guy, and is always in the right in every conflict.  I think Rusty may have been a little naieve in his approach, but Thomas was obviously a charismatic guy.

Rusty's account of Thomas' smuggling techniques was very interesting, and quite ingenious: would-be drug smugglers should take note :)

After the first layer of plastic cling wrapping, I added a thick coating of chilli powder.  Chilli has a powerful smell that throws the dogs off the scent.

Thomas has some fantastic stories: having a cocaine party with the governor of the prison in his cell, and seeing a rapist being beaten to death by his fellow inmates.

I tried to find out if prison tours are still available since we're heading to La Paz soon.  I couldn't get a definitive answer - it all seems to depend on knowing someone inside. 

Apparently the exposure of corruption in this book caused quite the controversy when it was published.  It will be interesting to see what happens when the movie is released, it is supposed to be out this year.

3.5 stars.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (4 stars)

A Pulitzer prize winner about the life of a hermaphrodite? Intriguing.

When I started reading this book, I felt cheated. I was annoyed that Eugenides was starting with Cal's grandparents, and that it was going to take so long to get to the real story. Nonetheless, I worked my way through 1920's Greece and into the next generation in Detroit. I found I enjoyed the journey, but still felt vaguely frustrated and eager to hear about Cal.

As Calliope/Cal's story developed, I was impressed with Eugenides' drawing of Cal's emotions.  I loved this passage:

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies felling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy".

Overall, I thought Eugenides' portrayal of Cal's awakening was masterfully done.  The story seemed so realistic that I became convinced it was at least based on a true story, but apparently that is not the case.

After Calliope's 'crocus' was discovered in the emergency room, and the medical drama began with Dr. Luce, I thought the story lost some of its momentum.  Cal as a runaway, hitch-hiker, and Golden Gate Park bum didn't resonate with me, and didn't seem to fit with the rest of the story.  However, I realise that a disconnect from the personality of Calliope was at least partly intentional, to mark the transition from Calliope to Cal.

A worthy prize winner, but I think I could have done with one less generation of Stephanides'.

4 stars.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher (3 stars)

A book by Princess Leia?  Sure, why not.  Fisher is of course used to being characterised by her role in Star Wars:

...I am not only this Princess Leia creature but also several-sized dolls, various T-shirts and posters, some cleansing items, and a bunch of other merchandise.  It turns out I was even a kind of pin-up - a fantasy that geeky teenage boys across the globe jerked off to me with some frequency.

The book is based on an autobiographical stage show she began performing in 2006, and reads exactly like a stand-up routine.  It is surprisingly funny, and I mean laugh-out-loud funny, which is a pretty rare thing.

She has a biting, sarcastic wit, which she uses to attack her father on a number of occasions.  Here she describes how her father Eddie rushed to Liz Taylor's side after the death of her husband:

He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and he ultimately consoled her with his penis.  Now this made marriage to my mother awkward, so he was gone within the week.

Fisher is very up front about her drug addictions, failed relationships and bipolar diagnosis (she even appears in an 'Abnormal Psychology' textbook under 'bipolar').

The book is tiny - lots of pictures and huge font, you can probably read it in less than an hour.  Not exactly deep, but entertaining.

3 stars

Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2 stars)

This is my 9th Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It seems that when reading a Pulitzer Prize winner you are guaranteed excellent writing, but excellent plot, as in this case, is optional.

Russo creates excellent characters, and gave me a real sense of knowing Empire Falls, a dying small town in Maine that lost its spirit with the closure of various mills owned by the Whiting family. Russo's skillful depiction of Miles' inability to escape from the dying town, the simultaneous death of his mother and her dream for him to go to college, and the constant bullying of John Voss, all made for quite a depressing read.

Unfortunately the skill of the writing and good character development doesn't make up for the plodding pace (483 pages in small font) and lack of interesting plot for most of the book. There is a flurry of excitement towards the end, and quite a good climax, but it seems rushed after the slow pace of the rest of the novel.

The book was made into a 2-part HBO miniseries, which I intend to watch. It could be quite good, since with only two parts most of the boring set-up can be condensed. If it flowed at the same pace of the book it would probably have to be a 26-part series...

2 stars.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (4.5 stars)

Ever since I read The Road, Cormac McCarthy's other works have been on my list. It had been some time since I'd seen the movie when I picked up this book, but the image of Chigurh walking around with that gas cylinder brought it back.

I loved this book, but it is definitely not easy reading. The dialogue is frequently confusing - it is often difficult to determine who is saying what without any 'he-said' 'she-said'. This sparse, but emotion-loaded dialogue reminded me a lot of The Road. Chigurh is a great character; he is ruthless, true to his word, and a great philosopher and student of human emotion and behaviour.

I love the charged emotion in this scene where an unwitting gas station attendant finds himself flipping a coin for his life:

You know what date is on this coin?

No.

It's nineteen fifty-eight. It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it's here. And I'm here. And I've got my hand over it. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

I don't know what it is I stand to win.

In the blue light the man's face was beaded thinly with sweat. He licked his upper lip.

You stand to win everything, Chigurh said. Everything.

Sheriff Bell has a brilliant, world-weary, beaten down sense of humour:

It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?
If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.

Moss, despite some obvious very bad choices, is a smart guy. The way he hides and later retrieves the satchel from the airconditioning duct in the hotel is ingenious. I was surprised McCarthy chose to leave Moss's fate to a retrospective look from Sheriff Bell. I would have thought the encounter between Moss and Chigurh after so much cat-and-mouse would have been the climax.

A great read.  Now I need to read Blood Meridian.

4.5 stars

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (4.5 stars)

I've read quite a few books about Iraq lately, so it was with some reluctance I picked up another, however I was intrigued given this book was the basis for the movie Green Zone. I'm glad I did - this is one of the best accounts of the war and reconstruction I have read. It takes a different tack and focuses not on the military aspects, but on the reconstruction efforts of the 'Coalition Provisional Authority' (CPA).

The narrative is characterised by the CPA's incompetence, cultural insensitivity, and cronyism. Every one of the staffers appointed to the CPA was vetted for their loyalty to the President and the Republican Party - answers to questions such as "Where do you stand on Roe vs. Wade?" were deemed much more important than experience in post-war reconstruction, or indeed any experience, since staffers in their early to mid 20s were handed hugely complex tasks, such as rebuilding the stock exchange.

John Agresto was handed the daunting task of of rehabilitating Iraq's university system (375,000 students, 22 campuses), he:

...had no background in post-conflict reconstruction and no experience in the Middle East. The institution he ran, St. John's College in Santa Fe, had fewer than five hundred students. But Agresto was connected: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's wife had been on the St. John's board...

This is particularly appalling since the US had a vast talent pool to draw from - many Arab experts, post-conflict experts and experienced diplomats from the State Department were ignored. In fact, State was seen as the enemy since it was inhabited by too many Democrats.

Little cultural sensitivity or desire to involve Iraqis in their countries' reconstruction was shown by the CPA. Hundreds of Iraqi secretaries and translators were forced to eat in the dining hall, which was:

a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner.

CPA staffers mistakenly took their translators, who had good paying jobs with the CPA and plenty of good things to say about the occupation, as being representative of all Iraqis. Staffers lived in their own world inside the Green Zone where the power was reliable, the buffet full of American comfort food, and drinking was the main after-work activity:

Scores of CPA staffers, including women who had had the foresight to pack hot pants and four-inch heels, danced on an illuminated Baath Party star embedded in the floor.

The CPA made some major mistakes: Overzealous De-Baathification removed most of the educated and experienced people in Iraq from their jobs, including thousands of teachers. Standing down the army made thousands of trained soldiers instantly unemployed, which quickly resulted in the creation of a disenfranchised insurgent army. And a general approach of focusing on the minutae (such as a traffic code and patent law), when basic needs for safety, electricity, food and water had not been met, was greeted with understandable incredulity from the Iraqis.

I'm not sure how you go about making this book into an action movie with Matt Damon, but I'll let you know once I have seen it.

4.5 stars.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (5 stars)

What's it going to be then, eh?

Back in 2008 when I was trying to think of a name for this blog, I decided it should be the first line from one of my favourite books. After some deliberation I settled on this one, a question asked by Alex at the start of each of the three sections of the book, not only because I liked the book, but because it seemed appropriate for a book review blog.

The main reason I love this book is for its ingenious language. Burgess invents a slang language he calls nadsat for his teenage characters that consists of around 200 words, based mostly on Russian:

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything.

After reading this I feel like govoreeting my horrorshow slovos to my droogs :)

The violence in the book is horrendous, which is the main reason I've never seen Kubrick's film adaptation. Alex's deep, ingrained love of 'the ultra-violence' and the advent of psychological conditioning as a 'cure' lead Burgess to pose the question:

Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Burgess makes it clear that he thinks Alex must be allowed to choose to be good. In the final (21st) chapter, Alex makes a startling turn-around. This chapter has become infamous because it was excluded from the US published version, and Kubrick also elected to leave it out of the film.

Some seem to think the final chapter is a cop out, but I disagree. I think it is a better ending - an enduring lifetime of unending violence seems unlikely for anyone, even a monster like Alex.

5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to giving the movie a viddy, and while it is a faithful adaptation of the book, I just don't think it is anywhere near as good. The crime and the city seemed much less apocalyptic than I imagined from the book, the nadsat slang was toned down, and I felt the whole thing should have just been...darker.

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (2.5 stars)

In Heat, Buford provides an interesting insight into life in a 3-star restaurant in Manhattan, and takes in a variety of prima-donna celebrity chefs and crazy kitchen characters.  The book begins with the author becoming a kitchen slave in Babbo, an Italian restaurant owned by Mario Batali.  Batali is one of the most famous chefs in the US: he had his own show Malto Mario on the food network, and was one of the regular competitors on Iron Chef America.

You first get a taste for the craziness that is to come when Buford describes the behaviour of Marco Pierre White, one of Batali's mentors:

Patrons ("fat ugly bastards") who ordered meat well done were an insult to the kitchen, and on two occasions Marco ordered them to leave his restaurant before they completed their meals...When someone ordered fried potatoes he was so insulted he prepared them himself and charged five hundred dollars.

Buford struggles with the heat and stress of the kitchen, injures himself fairly frequently, and comes home with hands so stinky that even after the Lady Macbeth treatment their odour wakes up his wife like smelling salts.

I found this early part of the book interesting, but it lost my attention as the author began to wander down some fairly boring paths.  I really don't care exactly when people starting using eggs to make pasta, and Buford's hunt through 15th and 16th century cookbooks was tedious.

I thought the book finished strongly with the mad Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini, who is the craziest and most interesting character Buford encounters.  I loved the descriptions of him dining in restaurants and blasting chefs for not sticking to the Tuscan letter of the law:

"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"

and his general attitude towards customers that deviates from the standard 'the customer is always right':

Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick.

I thought Buford did a reasonable job of writing a food book without making a verbal recipe book, but it failed to hold my attention for a significant portion of the story.

2.5 stars.

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (1 star)

After reading the epic that is Shantaram, I was drawn to books about Mumbai, and encouraged by some glowing reviews.  Chandra and Mehta have both produced massive epic tomes, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them, although Maximum City is much, much better than Sacred Games.

Mehta starts out very strongly, with fascinating insight into what it is like to live in the 'Country of the No'.

India is the Country of the No.  That 'no' is your test.  You have to get past it.  It is India's Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders.  Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge.

Mehta is experiencing reverse culture shock by moving his family back to Mumbai after a number of years living in New York (note this is $US!!).

Coming from New York, I am a pauper in Bombay.  The going rate for a nice apartment in the part of south Bombay where I grew up in is $3,000 a month, plus $200,000 as a deposit, interest-free and returnable in rupees.

Mehta also reinforced the impression I got from Shantaram of the slums:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery.  What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community...A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is an empty room in the big city.

There are some brilliant insights into Indian life and politics, like when Mehta follows a local politician on the campaign trail.  The politician visits only the slums, because the rich don't vote:

From the wealthy section of Malabar Hill, the legal residents of the district, the turnout is twelve per cent; from the squatters in the slum colonies, for whom the issue of who comes into power means the difference between living in four walls or on the street, it's eighty-eight per cent...This is the biggest difference between the world's two largest democracies: in India, the poor vote.

Mehta's description of the systemic problems caused by the Rent Act is fascinating.  The Rent Act was introduced immediately after World War II to provide affordable housing and prevent price gouging by fixing rent at a court appointed rate.  As long as the tenant pays rent, they cannot be evicted, and the lease can be transferred to the tenants' heirs.  This law is now politically impossible to repeal, because there will always be more tenants than landlords, and the 2.5 million tenants in Bombay are the most powerful political lobby in the city.  The result is:

Some of the richest people in the city live in rent-controlled bungalows all around Malabar Hill, inherited from their grandparents and great-grandparents...The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 homes a year...There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out.

The section of the book that follows senior police officer Ajay Lal is also interesting and scary.  The justice system is broken and corruption is a way of life.  The courts are useless; there are no costs associated with filing lawsuits so the majority are frivolous and have created a huge backlog, which at the current rate will take 350 years to clear.  In this climate, the police kill criminals in 'encounters' as a fast form of justice.

For ordinary Mumbaikers, the only form of real justice available is from the gangsters, the bhais themselves:

The sense that justice can be obtained from the underworld is so pervasive that the phenomenon has reached its logical conclusion: in November 1999, a senior judge in Bombay himself approached Shakeel [a bhai] for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a 'chit fund', an informal savings scheme.

As Mehta continues his fascination with the gangster 'shooters' and police 'encounter specialists' I began to lose interest.  Mehta seems to want to romanticize these dangerous characters and maintains a huge amount of reverence for them.  However, I do need to concede that a large part of that reverence would have been motivated by fear of what his words could mean for his family's safety, and I respect Mehta has been very brave in writing this book.

The introduction to the dancer 'Monalisa' is brilliant:

On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high class stripper in a New York bar.  The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn't have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.

Unfortunately, this is the point the book really falls apart.  The 'Pleasure' chapter begins well, but soon starts to drag.  There is little interesting development, and the story degenerates into a boring verbose journalistic description of Monalisa's life.

Mehta goes on to treat interesting subjects (such as Bollywood) but just drags each subject out for too long.  The final chapter is the least connected to the others, and should have been dropped.

Overall, there are some brilliant sections in this book, and I learned a lot about Mumbai.  However, it is a horrendous read, and should have been at least 200 pages shorter.  What is it with unedited rambles about Mumbai?

1 star

Graceling by Kristin Cashore (3 stars)

I'm a sucker for superpowers books, and the 'graces' in this novel got me interested.  I initially loved Katsa's power, and her internal conflict over her actions as King Randa's pawn.  Unfortunately she turns out to be a Mary Sue: not only is she the best fighter in the world, she is also the best hunter and survivalist, doesn't get hungry, doesn't feel pain, doesn't need sleep, cannot get lost, and is the inspirational leader of an underground government fighting for justice.

I also found her relationship with Po fairly annoying.  She takes ages to realise Po (who is a Gary Stu with his own set of amazing powers) couldn't be more perfect for her, and when she does she gets really...angry?  What the?  This passage where she wakes up in a rage for no reason is just bizarre:

Katsa didn't know what was wrong with her when she woke the next morning.  She couldn't explain the fury she felt toward him.  There was no explanation; and perhaps he knew that, because he asked for none.

There is also a very strong anti-marriage message from Katsa, which seems misplaced.  I get it, she is a strong willed, independent woman.  So why should that change if she gets married?  Maybe Cashore was just trying to make a point about women's rights in medieval times.

The climax comes and goes within a page.  It seemed weird that Cashore created a bad guy with such a cool power, then killed him so quickly.  I would have liked to have seen a war campaign waged between The Council and Leck.

I still enjoyed the book, and the battle with Leck in the forest was great.  Not bad for a first novel.

3 stars.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (1 star)

Da Vinci Code: entertaining, Angels and Demons: meh..OK, The Lost Symbol: sucks.

This book is horrible: formulaic Dan Brown, with a really boring and obvious ending.  It annoyed me in so many ways it is hard to know where to start.

Katherine is supposedly a genius whose work in the field of Noetics is going to change the 'entire world forever'.  But somehow she fails to be suspicious of a doctor who has supposedly been treating her brother (despite Peter never mentioning it), who invites her to his creepy house, wears a creepy amount of makeup, and manages to invite himself into her super-secret laboratory.  As an aside the field of 'Noetics' in the real world, sounds like downtown quacksville.

The other characters are cliches stolen from weird places - Sato is totally 'Edna' the crazy designer from the Incredibles, and does Mal'akh the giant tatooed fanatic sound a little like Red Dragon to anyone else?  Or perhaps the crazy albino, but with tattoos?

Brown seems to have hired a technology consultant for the 'hacking' section since he mentions traceroute and whois, but screws it up with sentences like:

Trish, this IP has a funky format.  It's written in a protocol that isn't even publicly available yet.  It's probably gov intel or military.

I'm running a diagnostic, and this firewall coding looks...pretty serious.

An IP address written in a protocol no-one else uses isn't going to be that useful now is it?  In fact it won't even be an Internet Protocol (IP) address unless it conforms to the Internet Protocol.  A serious firewall is just a whole lot of closed ports, and there is no 'coding' exposed to the outside.  But no-one gets hacking right, and I digress.

The 'national security' issue that looms over most of the novel is pissweak.  Oh no, some important people will be embarrassed in a video.  Who cares.  I thought Mr. Red Dragon had bought a nuke or something.  And why is the CIA the ones running all over DC chasing this guy, shouldn't it be the FBI?  Or weren't they sexy enough?

Brown uses a really annoying, lazy phrase to describe a memory flashback:

...Mal'akh flashed on the only other woman he had ever killed.

As Langdon tried to process what Katherine had said, he flashed unexpectedly on the gnostic Gospel of Mary...

'flashed on'???  What the?

The ending couldn't have been more obvious.  If you haven't picked where the ancient mysteries are located within the first 20 pages, you need to turn up your 'really obvious plot point' detector.  Also, worst treasure ever.  Seriously.  Why the hell would you go to all that trouble to hide something so boring and commonplace?

The dénouement is the worst part of the whole book - pages of cobbled together references pointed in the vague direction of a hand-wavy philosophy conclusion.  And it sounds like this:

...the Bible and the Ancient Mysteries are total opposites.  The mysteries are all about the god within you...man as god.  The Bible is all about the God above you...and man as a powerless sinner.

Blah blah blah.  Right at the end Brown builds us up for another big reveal that is...a sunrise.  Yay.

Did you notice there were exactly 33 points made in this review?  Not really, but if you believed that you will probably enjoy this book.

1 star.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell (2.5 stars)

The initial impression the author gave me was that he is a loser, a stereotypical no-hoper who hasn't ever worked hard in his life and had to cheat on the drug test to get into the army. As I read, my estimation of him improved, he is actually quite intelligent, well-read, and not a bad writer.

The book is a product of Colby's blog, which he started while deployed in Iraq (despite thinking blogging was 'nerdy'). It became incredibly famous as a no-holds-barred unofficial account of the war from someone who was living it.

Unfortunately as a book, it still feels very bloggy. It is a mostly factual account of 'we went here, this happened', and except for the early part of the book, has little reflection from Colby.

It was interesting reading this after the Accidental Guerrilla, because I read first hand about how ineffective the US was in Iraq. I was amazed to read about soldiers playing Playstations on their big screen TVs (bought from the PX) in air-conditioned shipping containers on the Forward Operating Base (FOB), then rolling out in armoured Strykers for search-and-destroy missions. They were completely ineffective at stopping insurgents from mortaring the base every single day:

we didn't catch a single one of those mortarmen in the act of mortaring our FOB the entire time we were there.

2.5 stars.

The Accidental Guerrilla: fighting small wars in the midst of a big one by David Kilcullen (2 stars)

I saw (on TV) Kilcullen give a fascinating address at the press club in August 2009, which prompted me to read his book. It was a pretty tough read. In Kilcullen's own words:

This book, like its wars, is a hybrid...perhaps too academic to be popular and too populist to be purely academic.

It definitely errs on the textbook side of things, with very dense text. Having said that, Kilcullen presents a interesting analysis of a number of insurgency-based conflicts, with a focus on Afganistan and Iraq. He analyses the tactics that have been used, their problems, and details why the (mis-named) 'surge' in Iraq was effective due to a switch to a counterinsurgency approach. Kilcullen, an Australian, rose spectacularly to fame to become Petraeus' most senior counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq.

Kilcullen agrees with the Chinese PLA authors of Chao Xian Zhan (Unrestricted Warfare), in that:

Western countries, particularly the United States, had created a trap for themselves by their very dominance of conventional warfare. Confronting the United States in direct conventional combat would indeed be folly, but rather than eschewing conflict, other countries or even nonstate actors could defeat the superpower through ignoring the Western-defined rules of "conventional" war, instead applying what the authors called the "principle of addition": combining direct combat with electronic, diplomatic, cyber, terrorist, proxy, economic, political, and propaganda tools to overload, deceive, and exhaust the US "system of systems."

and

strong countries would not use "unrestricted warfare" against weak countries becuase "strong countries make the rules while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes...[The United States] has to observe its own rules of the whole world will not trust it."

Can the US change how it wages war? Maybe not:

...And because capabilities for irregular or unconventional conflict are much cheaper to acquire than those for conventional conflict...they are paradoxically less likely to be developed...a substantial portion of the American economy, and numerous jobs in almost every congressional district, are linked to the production of conventional war-fighting capacity.

Kilcullen chooses the term takfiri to refer to Islamic terrorists:

The doctrine of takfir disobeys the Qur'anic injunction against compulsion in religion (Surah al-Baqarah: 256) and instead holds that Muslims whose beliefs differ from the takfiri's are infidels who must be killed. Takfirism is a heresy within Islam: it was outlawed in the 2005 Amman Message, an initiative of King Abdullah II of Jordan, which brought together more than 500 'ulema (Islamic scholars) and Muslim political leaders...in an unprecedented consensus agreement...Al Qa'ida is takfiri, and its members are universally so described by other Muslims.

Kilcullen presents four models to represent the current threat environment, which are neither exhaustive or mutually exclusive. They are the 'Globalization Backlash' thesis, the 'Globalized Insurgency' model, the 'Islamic Civil War' theory, and the 'Asymmetric Warfare' model. I won't address them all, but here is a quote on the Islamic Civil War theory:

...the Islamic civil war thesis suggests that the primary threat of takfirism is against stability in the Arab world and the broader Muslim community worldwide, and only secondarily against Western governments and populations. By intervening directly against AQ, this theory suggests, we have not only waded into someone else's domestic dispute but have also treated AQ as a peer competitor worthy of our top priority and full attention, thus immensly increasing AQ's credibility and clout in its struggle for ascendancy over the ummah.

On asymmetric warfare:

the 9/11 Commission estimate that the 9/11 attacks cost AQ between $400,000 and $500,000, plus the cost of training the 19 hijackers in the United States prior to the attack. This would make the 9/11 attacks the most expensive terrorist attack in history. But when one considers that the attacks inflicted a direct cost of $27.2 billion on the United States, and that subsequent operations in the "War on Terrorism" have cost about $700 billion to mid-2008, it is clear that the cost of the attack to America has vastly outweighed its costs to AQ...

the United States has so far spent $1.4 million per dollar of AQ investment in the attacks on the response.

The coalition screwed up in Afganistan by being out-governed by the Taliban at the local level. While the 'international community is training Supreme Court judges and seeking to build an Afgan legal system based on the post-2001 constitution', the Taliban is providing practical dispute resolution and legal services throughout southern Afghanistan, a 'shadow judiciary that expanded Taliban influence by settling disagreements, hearing civil and criminal matters' etc.

Counterinsurgency is all about providing security for the population in their local area, ie. it is population-centric rather than enemy-centric (where enemies are hunted down and killed in sweeping manoeuvres):

the more organized, locally present, and better armed a group is, the more likely it is to be able to enforce a consistent system of rules and sanctions, giving the population the order and predictability it craves...

The idea is to maintain a persistent presence to draw the enemy out of hiding into attacking your defences. This was proven to be much more effective in Iraq during the surge than the previous enemy-centric strategy of search-and-destroy sweeps that killed many civilians and provoked a public backlash.

On page 121 Kilcullen provides a brilliant description of the 'dialogue of the deaf', which perfectly characterised the disconnect between Americans trying to reduce incident numbers as a measure for success for congress, and the Iraqis trying to protect the population.

There is so much quotable in this book I could go on forever, but this is already too long. Needless to say, I found the book very interesting, although I often found myself saying 'well, Duh', because some of the observations and strategies seemed to be common sense. In any case, I'm so glad someone with that common sense is now advising the American military.

A few to end with.

I have shown how most of the adversaries Western powers have been fighting since 9/11 are in fact accidental guerrillas: people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in their societies.

In terms of strategy, the Iraq example indicates that for us to invade foreign countries with large-scale unilateral military intervention forces simply plays into the AQ exhaustion strategy already described, creates space for the infection of societies by extremism, and prompts contagion to the wider world. (As successive intelligence estimates have shown of Iraq, the conflict has exacerbated extremism worldwide, and as noted actual violence has spilled over into neighboring countries, and further afield, as has radicalization.)

This explains a lot:

Why did most countries (including those who opposed the Iraq war) believe in 2002 that Saddam Hussein's regime had WMDs? Because they were intercepting the regime's communications, and many senior Iraqi regime members believed Iraq had them.

Despite learning a lot from this book I can't give it a high score because it is such a hard read - it is extremely wordy, dense, and has a fair bit of repetition.

2 stars.

The Five Greatest Warriors by Matthew Reilly (1 star)

The Five Greatest Warriors is the even-more-silly sequel to The Six Sacred Stones that ended on a cliffhanger with Jack West Jr falling into an abyss. Despite the clumsy over-the-top cliffhanger, I certainly wasn't rushing out to buy this book, but thought I'd read it to finish off the story. So let the criticism begin (some spoilers ahead).

When Jack and Zoe are watching Pooh Bear's pulse as he breaks into the Israeli prison, isn't it convenient that they are waiting for it to take a sudden dive and the attackers oblige by drugging Pooh Bear? What if they had just decided to beat the shit out of him instead? Lame.

Reilly uses the 'traitor' plot twist far too often, by the end of the book most of Jack's team have turned out to be working for somebody else.

Counting JC as one of the 'Five Greatest Warriors' was ridiculous, and only done so that Reilly could make finding Jesus' tomb one of the tasks to be performed in the quest. Here is the shitty justification:

'Jesus Christ is not commonly called a warrior. He was a man of peace.'
'He carried a sword', Wizard countered, 'and at one famous point in the Gospel of Luke, he urged his followers to go and buy swords.'
'And many of those followers were revolutionaries urging insurrection against Rome,' Julius said.

Weak.

The descriptions of how the rest of the world is getting through the chaos of the dark star appearing are so tokenistic - a couple of paragraphs strewn here and there in-between action:

At the same time, the National Weather Service reported unusual weather patterns all over the world: fierce flooding in Brazil; sandstorms in China; cyclones in the Pacific; even a weeklong rainstorm in the Sahara Desert.

Meteorologists were confounded.
It was as if the world had gone mad.

Wow, what a shitty description of what is supposed to be the end of the frickin world.

At the third vertex there is a lava trap. Come on!

As soon as Jack set foot on the first step of the second tower, lava began oozing out the top of the third one, so that now three separate rivers of lava were pouring down from the peaks of the first three towers, all at different stages in their descents.

So what if someone had triggered this trap sometime in the previous few thousand years? The lava would have cooled, formed rock, and the intricate channel system would be blocked and never work again. What if the lava was a different temperature than the designers expected and didn't flow at all? Of course this is all assuming that building a giant intricate tower city inside a fricking volcano is a good idea. Nevermind the practicalities of how you actually build something that big inside a volcano in the first place, what are the chances the volcano won't erupt or damage the system in any way over the next few thousand years?

Continuing the completely implausible vertex locations, Reilly picks Diego Garcia, a coral atoll with maximum elevation of 6.7m as the perfect spot for yet another giant underground space. We're told that the entrance:

...resembled an open-cut mine, at least seven storeys deep...

I'd like to see someone try to dig a hole like that into a coral atoll; it would be a good way to make a big seawater swimming pool.

Of course the biggest problem is why the designers of the machine made it so ridiculously hard to turn on. And more to the point - if they knew exactly when disaster was going to occur, why not make it turn on automatically? If you went to all the trouble of making a machine to save the world would you really hide the keys to it all over the planet and booby trap their locations such that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to gather them? Sigh.

Given that Reilly wants to go even bigger with his next novel:

I'll have to make sure that it's a huge story idea. To my mind, any new Jack West Jr novel will have to be bigger and bolder than the three I've already written. And if I do decide to write it, I will do so with a plan to creating a story that will count down all the way to a seventh and final novel (The One Something Something).

I think my Reilly journey has ended.

1 star.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult (3 stars)

Jodi Picoult loves to twist the knife. Your daughter Kate is dying of an aggressive form of cancer. Your other daughter Anna is a donor being harvested for spare parts, and she doesn't want to do it anymore so she is suing you. Your son is an arsonist, which is even more complicated because your husband is the Captain of the fire brigade. Kate stays alive long enough to meet her soul-mate, who then dies suddenly (also of cancer) without a chance for her to say goodbye.

Could it be any more tragic? It's like Picoult tries to think up the most horrendous family situation she can, then writes about it with the goal of making you cry as much as possible.

I also found some of the characters fairly unbelievable. I doubt a teenage Jesse lighting fires for attention would have been smart enough to create chemical accelerants and hide his tracks so effectively. Anna was also unrealistically mature for 13, and able to hold up witty repartee with adults that would be far beyond any real 13-year old. Anna is able to pick that Campbell is lying about why he has his dog:

"You're lying."
Anna croses her arms. "Well, you lied first. You hear perfectly fine."
"And you're a brat." I start to laugh. "You remind me of me."
"Is that supposed to be a good thing?" Anna says, but she's smiling.

And argues like a debating champion or a politician:

"It doesn't work that way," I say. "You started this lawsuit. You wanted to be someone other than the person your family's made you for the past thirteen years. And that means you have to pull back the curtain and show us who she is."
"Half the grown-ups on this planet have no idea who they are, but they get to make decisions for themselves every day," Anna argues

Having said all that, even though it is incredibly sad, I enjoyed most of this book.

Until the ending.

The ending is horrible, and compromises the entire book. Picoult spends 400 pages discussing an incredibly tough moral and ethical dilemma and then throws it away with a trite 'happily ever after' ending where everything works out way too conveniently and Anna doesn't have to make a choice.

I wanted to see what choice Anna was going to make! Would it be possible for her to look beyond the risk to herself and possible health complications in the future for the sake of her sister? How would she weigh a small chance of extra time with Kate against her own health? If she didn't donate the kidney how would she live with that decision for the rest of her life? Would she respect Kate's wishes if Kate asked her not to donate?

3 stars.

Cross Stitch (aka Outlander) by Diana Gabaldon (1 star)

Time travel you say? I'm willing to give it a shot, even though the cover is a suspicious shade of pink with flowery writing...

It turns out the time-travel construct is an un-explained crutch to write a soft-porn novel for middle-aged women who have a thing for big Scottish red-heads in kilts. This 863-page novel is chock full of sex and disturbing sexual violence. It isn't long after Claire arrives in 18th century Scotland that Gabaldon invents a bizarre reason for her to marry Jamie so the sex can kick off:

...the only way I can legally refuse to give ye to Randall is to change ye from an Englishwoman into a Scot...Ye must marry a Scot. Young Jamie.

It annoyed me that Claire slotted perfectly into Scotland in 1743 after being transported from 1946. She effortlessly recalls dates, obscure names and customs from history lessons, and isn't surprised by anything she encounters. She doesn't complain about hygene, clothing, backward customs, women's rights (she takes a beating from her husband), or anything else you might expect to shock a modern woman thrust into life in the wilds of Scotland 200 years earlier. Also, the few people who do know she is from the future show only a mild interest in the future. What the hell? If I seriously believed someone was from the future I would be hammering them with questions.

I also got sick of reading passages like this:

'Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach,' he whispered. 'I want to own you, to possess you, body and soul.' I struggled slightly and he pressed me down, hammering me, a solid, inexorable pounding that reached my womb with each stroke. 'I mean to make ye call me "Master", Sassenach'.

Why does Jamie continue to call Claire 'Sassenach'? It is pretty much like calling her 'English', which he continues to do after they are married and declare their love for each other. Weird.

I can't believe how many people on Amazon gave this 5 stars.

1 star.

Magician by Raymond E. Feist (4.5 stars)

This book is always in top 100 lists. I had a vague feeling I had read it before, but I thought I'd take it on anyway. I bought the 10th anniversary "author's preferred edition", in which Feist has taken the unusual step of adding back in all the words he was told to cut by the original editor. Turns out I had read it before, but I barely remembered anything - not because it was boring, I just read it a long time ago.

It is a great story, and the addition of another world (two maps!) does wonders to change what would otherwise have been fairly formulaic fantasy: magic, dwarves, elves, goblins etc. Having said that, there are still some times I thought I was reading Lord of the Rings (mines of Moria anyone?):

There is one mine that passes completely under the mountains, coming out on the other side of the range, only a day's march from the road to Bordon. It will take two days to pass through, and there may be dangers.

I liked that Pug really sucks at being a magician at first, thus avoiding being a Mary Sue like Kvothe, although his name is almost as bad. Similarly I enjoyed Tomas' struggle with the armour that gives him amazing powers but is also dangerous. The explanation of magic by Feist pales in comparison to that in The Name of The Wind.

The idea of two human-like races happening to chance across each other in the vastness of the universe at a similar medieval stage of development is completely implausible, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. I also think that such powerful magicians (and particularly the Warlords' pet magicians) would have come up with better weapons than swords, and have better transport for troops than moving forces by foot.

At 681 tiny-font pages it is definitely epic, but I think Feist mostly gets the tempo right. The beginning is fairly slow, but once the invasion starts it is pretty relentless. Potentially boring sequences such as travelling over the same ground are skipped, although the time jumps are occasionally a bit heavy handed. It is obvious that the book was written to stand alone, and Feist confirms in the foreword that the original editor wasn't keen on a sequel. I think I would have preferred to have more loose ends to motivate reading the next in the series.

4.5 stars

The Hunger Games - Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (3 stars)

After the amazing first Hunger Games book, I was looking forward to this one. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as good.

The book begins by tidying up the aftermath of the Hunger Games: life as a 'victor', the victory tour, and Katniss' re-uniting with Gale. All are given fairly boring treatment, with much of it in narrative summary, and missing the sense of urgency for revolution I was expecting from the ending of the first book. Katniss faffs around and Gale, supposedly the rebel, spends the whole novel working in the coal mines being a good little oppressed peon. It wasn't long before I was thinking the only way this book was going to be any good was if they got back into the arena.

Obviously Collins or her editor thought the same thing, and so we end up with basically the same novel but written worse this time. The new arena is reasonably interesting, but not enough to make it a great book. The ending is not bad, but we could have arrived at the same point if Katniss had decided to throw her lot in with Bonnie and Twill, saving us the mediocre plot re-hash.

Despite all that criticism I still quite enjoyed the book, and I hope the third one is a return to form.

3 stars.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (4.5 stars)

I'm told it's the 'best book ever written' by a friend - better read it then. It is a pretty amazing debut for Rothfuss, I just hope he doesn't leave us hanging for years for the sequel.

The story and characters have some very strong Potter overtones - the whole section of the book at the University where Kvothe, the improverished student, struggles to learn as much as possible despite the interference from his enemies Ambrose (Malfoy) and Master Hemme (Snape), is vintage Rowling.

Kvothe is also a just a tad too awesome for my liking: not only is he a faster learner than everyone else at University and an artificing genius, he is also a musical prodigy, has a photographic memory, is an accomplished actor, is fluent in most languages, and attracts the most beautiful women in the city. The only things that save his character are his arrogance (how could someone like that not be arrogant!), his occasional bad decisions and child-like pettiness, and his complete lack of a clue when it comes to women.

I think Elodin is the coolest character in the book, and I loved it when he gets Kvothe to jump off a roof and watches him splat on the ground.

The explanation of magic (sympathy) is a particularly cool idea, much better than the vague latin bastardisation for spells dreamt up by Rowling.

Not the best book ever written, but pretty good.

4.5 stars.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright (4 stars)

A friend lent me this after I raved about the HBO miniseries of the same name created by the brains trust behind The Wire (my favourite TV show of all time) - Ed Burns and David Simon. The HBO series is brilliant and, like The Wire, struck me as a brilliant warts-and-all exposé.

I usually don't like reading the book after watching 'the movie', because I find myself inserting scenes from the movie in my head instead of using my own imagination. I felt the same in this case, although I think this is one of the very rare situations where the TV show is as good as, or better than, the book. As an aside: Sgt. Rudy Reyes plays himself in the HBO series!

The full title of the book is Generation Kill: Living dangerously on the road to Baghdad with the ultraviolent Marines of Bravo Company. It was written by a Rolling Stone reporter who travelled with the elite of the American Marines: the Recon Marines that were at 'tippity-tip' of the pointy end of the initial invasion of Iraq.

The marines are all complex characters. Many of them are conflicted and disillusioned, some extremely well educated, while others occasionally fit the mold of stupid killing machines that love war. The latter produced some of the most horrible and memorable quotes:

[Trombley:]"I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush," he enthuses. "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool."

Tonight he entertains his fellow troops by pacing the tent, reading letters aloud sent by schoolchildren to boost morale. He opens one from a girl who writes that she is praying for world peace. He throws it down. "Hey, little tyke", Person shouts. "What does this say on my shirt? 'U.S. Marine!' I wasn't born on some hippie-faggot commune. I'm a death-dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife."

"They kill hundreds of people, those pilots. I would have loved to have flown the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan. A couple of dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That fucking rules! Yeah!"

[Person:]"I just read that all these pussy pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears were going to make an antiwar song. When I become a pop star, I'm just going to make pro-war songs."

In the TV series, the Marine senior leadership appears totally incompetent, they constantly endanger the lives of First Recon in ways that seem astounding. They frequently send the marines into known ambushes and against suspected tank battalions in open-top un-armoured humvees without air or artillery support. In the book the strategy actually gets explained, and the author has a grudging respect for it:

The rationale makes sense when it's explained to me by [General] Mattis after the invasion: The small force [First Recon] races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it's the small one), and the big force hits them where they're not looking for it. It's a trick that works best when you're going up against an army like Iraq's, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I'm glad I didn't know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn't tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.

The most depressing part of the book is reading about the continued tolerated incompetence of key officers that constantly endangers everyone's lives, and results in civilian and Marine casualties. 'Captain America' abusing a prisoner and 'Encino Man' calling in a 'danger-close' artillery strike that would almost certainly have killed the platoon come to mind. Thankfully most of the time the other officers and enlisted men can negate the stupidity and incompetence.

Very interesting book and miniseries.

4 stars.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (4.5 stars)

Life of Pi won the booker prize in 2002, which, sadly, made me nervous about picking it up lest it turn out to be another brilliantly written ramble in need of a plot. When I read this passage I got a sinking feeling the book was going turn into one long boring theological lecture:

The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite. If you ask me how Brahman and atman relate precisely, I would...

*yawn*. Thankfully the story takes a very sudden and unexpected turn, and is a great read. Pi's interest and connection with the zoo and animals is interesting, makes for great tales, and is a continuing theme through the whole book. I loved the animal psychology and how Pi reasons out his strategy for living in a lifeboat with 'Richard Parker' the Bengal tiger. I also have to admit to being fascinated by the survival equipment in the lifeboat and how Pi puts it to use.

The ending is quite a shock, and very thought provoking. What is the real story? Does it matter? I liked Pi's conversation with the Japanese investigators, and his belligerent defence of the 'better story'. The implication that we should make a leap of faith (even into atheism) rather than have the 'dry, yeast-less factuality' of the agnostic is an interesting message.

4.5 stars

The Islands by Di Morrissey (2 stars)

When I picked this book up from the library I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it:

...a handsome American naval officer sweeps her off her feet and she goes to live in the beautiful Hawaiian Islands with her new husband...she begins to discover that paradise has a darker side...

But it was on the Dymocks top 100 list, and I figured I might as well get it read since I'm willing to give most authors a chance.

The first part of the book was exactly what I had expected: a cardboard cutout of a 'perfect' courtship, marriage, and honeymoon. The only thing that kept me interested was I could see some definite cracks appearing.

As the story unfolded I was surprised by the depth of detail about Hawaii and surfing. This aspect of the story managed to keep my interest while I was waiting for darling Bradley to turn into a psychopathic killer. Unfortunately the 'darker side' alluded to in the description is not really that dark: the book is completely devoid of twists and plays out the very obvious plot.

Certainly not a great book, but I had been ready to dismiss it as trash. Ms. Morrissey obviously really liked Hawaii, and I enjoyed matching her descriptions with my memories of the islands.

2 stars.